America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (23 page)

Published on January 5, 1948, the book was an instant hit. Kinsey was suddenly “America’s Most-Talked-About Male,” according to the influential journalist Vance Packard, later the author of the classic book on the advertising industry,
The Hidden Persuaders
.
Life
compared him to his hero: “To find another scientific book which even approaches this, it probably is necessary to go back to Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
.” Likewise,
Science Illustrated
raved, “His encyclopedic work is being hailed as one of the great sociological labors of our age, a frame of factual reference in a field which up to now has been disorganized, chaotic and filled with dangerous misinformation.” According to the serial counter himself, about 95 percent of the articles in the popular press were positive. At Kinsey’s behest, George Gallup conducted a poll to track the public response, which indicated that 78 percent of Americans considered his report “a good thing,” as opposed to 10 percent who disapproved. In May, after the book hit Number 1 on the
New York Times
bestseller list, an excited Kinsey wrote to a colleague, “When I can get enough sleep, I realize that this has been a handsome reception to our work.” (For the man who sexualized everything,
handsome
was a favorite descriptor.) By June, 150,000 copies had been sold, and contracts had been signed for British, Swedish, French, and Italian editions. That December, actress Mae West, who would later describe herself in
Cosmopolitan
as a kindred spirit when it came to “observing [and] investigating” sex, sent Kinsey a telegram, inviting him to her suite at Manhattan’s Warwick Hotel. He declined, as he had little interest in bantering with celebrities; and he would never develop a knack for small talk.

While the public adored him, many academics were lukewarm. As a biologist who was encroaching on the turf then patrolled by psychoanalysts, psychologists, and sociologists, Kinsey met with considerable criticism in the professional reviews that came out over the next few years. (Ever the collector, Kinsey asked an assistant to type the most scathing barbs on three-by-five cards.) In a twelve-page piece published in
Psychosomatic Medicine
in 1948, the psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie, while lauding Kinsey’s “colossal undertaking,” attacked him for various reasons, including his failure to understand the fallibility of human memory and his lack of attention to psychological factors. Kinsey responded with outrage. The self-absorbed former bugologist saw everything in Manichean terms; other people were either for him or against him. Convinced that he was unmasking millennia of religious cant about sexuality, Kinsey had assumed that the entire scientific community would automatically offer enthusiastic support. “If Kubie’s review is scientific,” he told a colleague, “then I have never had any contact with science.” In contrast, his sponsors at the Rockefeller Foundation sniffed out Kubie for what he really was, a Freudian wounded that Kinsey’s survey did not pay sufficient homage to analytic tenets, and they paid little attention to his critique. A much more serious threat to Kinsey’s continued funding—he was then hard at work on the female volume—came in the form of Warren Weaver, the head of the natural sciences division at the Rockefeller Foundation. Unlike Kubie, this former math prof at the University of Wisconsin had no sympathy for what Kinsey was trying to do. Moreover, Weaver was a renowned expert in statistics, the area in which the male volume was the most vulnerable. Though Kinsey loved to count, like Heinz, he could at times be surprisingly imprecise with his numbers. He sometimes labeled a single case as “the average.”

Even worse for Kinsey, his bête noire was cut from the same characterological cloth. As Weaver later noted in his autobiography, he also took “too much delight in precision.” Beset by his own set of compulsions, Weaver could not mount a flight of stairs without counting every step. A collector by nature, Weaver amassed 160 different versions of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
published in forty-two languages and wrote a scholarly monograph on the translations. A major figure in twentieth-century science who coined the term “molecular genetics” in 1938, Weaver was interested in applying statistical theory to all branches of science. Aghast that Kinsey did not have a trained statistician on board—Clyde Martin lacked a Ph.D.—Weaver wrote the president of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1951 that “I know of no evidence that Kinsey understands the underlying statistical character of his work.” Weaver argued that his sex histories did not constitute a random sample and that his data thus could not claim to be representative. In that same memo, Weaver also expressed his disgust that Kinsey was using foundation dollars to collect erotic books and pay for a “full-time pornographer,” an allusion to William Dellenback, the photographer whom Kinsey had hired.

 To placate this éminence grise, the head honchos at the Rockefeller Foundation asked the American Statistical Association (ASA) to convene a statistical advisory panel to evaluate the male volume. Weaver himself looked over the shoulders of the three preeminent academics who completed the first draft of their report at the end of 1951. Its findings were balanced, as these number crunchers, unlike Weaver, were sensitive to the immense challenges that Kinsey faced. Declaring that “our overall impression is…favorable,” the ASA panel noted that Kinsey’s sexological survey was “superior” to what came before, but involved “many problems of measurement and sampling, for some of which there appear…to be no satisfactory solutions.” (This conclusion resonates with the reigning consensus among contemporary sex researchers that while survey data are often messy, they still can provide some useful baselines.) As the ASA report argued, Kinsey’s sample of 5,300 males was not random—c
ertain
groups such as prisoners and Indiana residents were overrepresented—but it would have been impossible to come up with a sample that was truly representative of the American population as a whole. Published three years later as a 338-page book,
Statistical Problems of the Kinsey Report
captures the essence of the matter. Kinsey’s data were not quite as definitive as he often insisted, but merely constituted, as he conceded in his introduction, “a first step in the accumulation of a body of scientific fact.” Weaver, however, was not satisfied, since he had hoped that the ASA findings would destroy Kinsey. Remaining on the offensive, Weaver wrote to a colleague that he objected “strenuously to the direct and implied interpretations which one finds throughout his two books.” But Kinsey had weathered the storm, and not much damage was done to his reputation.

Like Steve Jobs a half century later, this control freak would also master the product launch. On Thursday, August 20, 1953, at precisely 7:00 a.m. on both coasts and 6:30 a.m. Central Standard Time, Kinsey suddenly commandeered the national conversation. That was when the ironclad press embargo on his second survey,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
, was lifted. Despite its eight hundred pages of dense, humorless prose and the steep eight-dollar tab (more than twice the cost of a typical hardback), this report on the sex lives of 5,900 American women would rise to the top of the bestseller list even faster than the male volume, of which 250,000 copies priced at “sex-fifty” had already been sold. On “K-Day in the U.S.A.,” as the occasion was dubbed by journalists, dozens of major newspapers jumped at the chance to summarize Kinsey’s findings on the front page. Several weeks later, after the biologist had graced the pages of some thirty mass-circulation magazines, one New York woman quipped, “I wonder what angle
Popular Mechanics
will use.” For the rest of 1953, Kinsey was one of the most talked about personages in America, right up there with President Dwight Eisenhower and England’s newly crowned Elizabeth II. Hollywood stars also combed through his latest opus and formulated opinions. Acknowledging that she belonged to the 50 percent of women who, according to Kinsey, slept in the nude, actress Zsa Zsa Gabor questioned whether the text was lively enough, complaining, “The whole thing is too scientific.”

While
U.S. News and World Report
speculated that a “slick press agent, hired by Kinsey, was behind the build-up,” this super micromanager had orchestrated this flurry of publicity all by his lonesome. That spring, Kinsey had invited thirty journalists to attend—in groups of ten—four days of seminars in Bloomington on the forthcoming female volume. No galleys were sent out; the book had to be read on-site. Kinsey carefully organized the program, which, besides lectures, lunches, and a tour, also included lots of late-night frank, scientific sex talk with him. All reporters signed an agreement stipulating that they wouldn’t publish their stories, which could contain no more than five thousand words, until
K-Day
. He also obtained the right to review the final drafts for factual errors. Over the summer, Kinsey continued to stay on top of every detail. He monitored the list of review copies, which would not be sent out until late August, and all the advertising and promotional copy. He also increased the security measures in his office, burning the trash in the wastebaskets and putting the janitors under surveillance.

In late August, just as the press frenzy was at its peak, Prok himself was nowhere to be found. While his office announced that he was away on vacation, the workaholic hardly ever thought of anything besides the sex business; and to him, days off were anathema. In fact, Kinsey was ensconced in his refuge at California’s San Quentin State Prison, where he was busy interviewing prisoners about their sexual practices. As he told the warden, “This is the last place anyone will look for me.” Having completed two groundbreaking books, he was not interested in resting on his laurels. He was just warming up. Noting that “sex is here to stay,” Kinsey was determined to publish at least seven more volumes covering such topics as sexual adjustment in prison populations, the legal aspects of sex behavior, prostitution, and the heterosexual-homosexual balance. To knock off these items on his checklist, Kinsey estimated that his team needed to collect a total of 100,000 sex histories, about 85,000 more than they then had on hand.

But Kinsey never published another word on sex. Just a year after “K-Day,” with the congressional committee, led by Republican Carroll Reece, having completed its public hearings on “subversion” in nonprofits, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Dean Rusk officially caved in, issuing a press release stating that Kinsey was now “in a position to obtain support from other sources.” His two surveys had been profitable, but Kinsey, as Rusk knew well, actually had no other means of funding at the ready.

The loss of both dollars and prestige proved devastating. With his nerves frayed and his heart, which he called his “stubborn organ,” failing—due to the bout with rheumatic fever in childhood, it had always been weak—Kinsey was close to suicidal despair. “If I can’t work,” he repeatedly told friends in his final years, “I would rather die.” He forced himself to court potential benefactors, but he was ill suited to the task. While he could talk up his research, he “talked down to people,” as Glenway Wescott later recalled. His efforts were nearly all in vain. In an effort to boost his spirits, in the fall of 1955, Kinsey went on a seven-week trip to a half dozen European countries. During this “vacation,” the sixty-one-year-old scientist did little but collect information about sex. Portugal was a disappointment because, as he wrote in his journal, “Didn’t get much on sex here.” In London, accompanied by Mac, he hung out at Piccadilly Circus on a Saturday night between 8 p.m. and 3 a.m. to do a crucial count—his tally of both male and female prostitutes came to about one thousand. In Copenhagen, Kinsey met with an archivist who possessed the manuscripts of Hans Christian Andersen to verify his hypothesis that the fairy-tale writer was a closeted homosexual (a view now shared by most Andersen biographers). “The world simply must learn,” Kinsey observed after examining the evidence, “that persons with homosexual histories and exclusively homosexual histories have been…
important
.”

Kinsey had long worked to expose the disparity between the public and private. “I expect extramarital coitus,” the emerging sex researcher had written to Clyde Martin in 1940, “is in 80 percent of the really successful businessman’s history.… God, what a gap between social front and reality!” In an America burdened by rigid sexual norms, Kinsey was eager to prove that he was not the only alpha male who liked sex with other men or who racked up big orgasm numbers. However, he was also convinced that no one had the right to do unto him as he had done unto others; he felt entitled to his own secrets long after he was gone. When told by a friend that someone would probably write his biography, he protested, “Nonsense! The progress of science depends upon knowledge. It has nothing to do with personalities.” But this anti-introspective man could never acknowledge that for him, as for his predecessors in sexology such as Havelock Ellis, validation for his particular sexual tastes was a primary driver behind the scholarly oeuvre.

After suffering a heart attack on June 1, 1956, Kinsey was hospitalized for a week. Even though the prognosis was grim—his heart was enlarged and he was experiencing constant fibrillation—he refused to slow down, as his doctors advised. That summer, despite his weakened state, he continued to give lectures. In July, he spoke about sex education at a conference of high school biology teachers that met in Bloomington. Without notes, Kinsey gave a performance that was, as a colleague later put it, “of a well-nigh somnambulistic perfection in its concentratedness, directness, plainness, and phrasing.” A month later, Clara drove an ashen Kinsey to Purdue University in Lafayette to deliver an address before the National Deans Association, in which he managed to weave in a characteristic insult, noting that men engage in less sex as they age and “then they become deans.”

On August 18, Kinsey asked Indiana University president Herman Wells to come to his home to discuss some business matters related to his Institute for Sex Research. After meeting with the out-of-breath Kinsey, who was lying in bed propped up on pillows, Wells pulled Clara outside and told her to insist that her husband stop working. “No, it is impossible to do it,” she responded. “He went to Purdue last week when he shouldn’t have, and there is nothing you or I can do. He is just—this is his obsession.”